Shibumi Games

Simple board games hiding complexity

Play board games that use the Shibumi game system of marbles stacked on a 4x4 board, build computer opponents for those games, learn strategy, and analyse the structure of the games.

Installing Shibumi Games

Even though Shibumi Games has a graphical display, it is a regular Python package, so you can install it with pip install shibumi. If you haven't installed Python packages before, read Brett Cannon's quick-and-dirty guide.

Then run it with the shibumi command.

The default installation generates some errors about bdist_wheel that don't seem to actually cause any problems. You can either ignore them, or install wheel before installing Shibumi Games.

pip install wheel
pip install shibumi
shibumi

Known bug on Ubuntu 20.04:

qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.

This is a PySide2 bug that is missing some dependencies. You can work around it by installing those dependencies like this:

sudo apt install libxcb-xinerama0

Game Credits

The Shibumi game system was designed by Cameron Browne and Néstor Romeral Andrés. The complete set of game rules are available on the nestorgames web site, and the games used in this project are used with the generous permission of the designers. There are more games in a BGG list.

• Spaiji was designed by Néstor Romeral Andrés.
• Spargo and Margo were designed by Cameron Browne.
• Spire was designed by Dieter Stein, and took second place in the Shibumi Challenge.
• Spline was designed by Néstor Romeral Andrés.
• Sploof was designed by Matt Green, and took first place in the Shibumi Challenge.
• Spook was designed by Dieter Stein.

Image Credits

The marble and board graphics were designed by Cameron Browne, and are used with permission.

Some of the buttons combine Cameron's POV-Ray graphics with icons from the Open Iconic project.

More Information

If you'd like to help out with the project, or add your own games, see the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the source code. For all the details, look through the design journal for the project.

Shibumi games are built on top of the Zero Play library that you can use to build your own games.